Bound by the Void

The dead don't argue. She does — and that's how he knows something went wrong. Reynar Kelt spent nine years building an army that couldn't betray him: the silent, obedient dead, raised one by one to burn down the Inquisition that branded him as a boy and called it mercy. He has never failed a working. He has never raised anything that could look back at him and mean it. Until Ashcombe. In the ashes of a village the Inquisition put to the torch, Reynar pulls a hedge-mage named Isella Vayne back through the door she'd already walked through willingly. She doesn't rise like the others — hollow, obedient, silent. She rises furious, grieving, and entirely herself, bound to him by something older and hungrier than any working he's ever cast: the Tether, a debt neither of them agreed to and neither of them can walk away from. At his side stand the only two people he trusts to tell him the truth: Mireille Cassot, who has buried her own family twice and guards Reynar's conscience more fiercely than she guards his back, and Voss, a soldier still relearning how to follow a commander who has started arguing with his own army. None of them expected the dead woman in the Bonekeep's halls to become the one voice Reynar can't command — or the one he's started listening to anyway. Across the border, Cardinal Aurelio Thane is certain of exactly one thing: that the corruption he burned out of a seventeen-year-old boy nine years ago is still alive, still spreading, and still his to correct. He does not see a war coming. He sees a mercy he has not finished delivering. As Reynar and Isella dig deeper into the nature of the bond that joined them, they uncover an older truth the Void has been patient enough to wait for: the Tether was never meant to last. It was built to end — and the ending it demands may cost one of them everything the other is fighting for. In a world where mercy wears a brand and love is a debt collected by the dead, Reynar and Isella will have to decide what they owe each other, and what they're willing to burn to keep it. If you love: enemies-to-lovers necromancer romance, fated/forced soul-bonds, resurrected heroines who refuse to be grateful, morally gray antiheroes waging war on a corrupt church, and slow-burn love stories with a ticking clock — this is your next read.